[top-posted]
Further context as someone maintaining distributions with long-running
issues. There are many reasons an issue could stay open for a long time:
* It requires much more consideration (and could relate to multiple
branches of reference implementation or different steps along the way)
* It's a reminder of a very low-priority issue.
* It's a reminder to rethink a topic.
* It's a low-hanging fruit kept so early contributors could pick it up.
("Up for grabs" issue tag, for instance.)
* It's kept until another issue is resolved.
* It's kept for a while until the original person who opened it will
confirm it was resolved or still exists.
* Someone asked to handle it and they're given their time to do so
(depending on complexity and prioritization).
* Some PRs need - as I describe it - time to ripen. I believe whoever dealt
with that knows what I mean.
It's very hard to judge by issues. Perhaps comments on issues? I believe
issues should at least be commented on (and I'm a terrible offender at
this).
On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 12:14 AM, Douglas Bell <preact...@me.com> wrote:
>
> > On Dec 23, 2015, at 4:49 PM, Neil Bowers <neil.bow...@cogendo.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Number (and age if possible) of open tickets might show if someone's
> paying attention to the dist. Like David said, much like the adoption
> criteria. The issues don't have to be valid, they could even be spam for
> all it matters, as long as someone's taking care of them.
> >
> > This is a tricky issue, as I found when trying to tune the adoption
> criteria. There are plenty of big name dists that have a lot of open
> issues, and always do.
> >
> > My current thought on this is that if no issues are getting dealt with
> in some timeframe, then it fails the metric. Even if a dist has a pile of
> open issues, if at least some issues are getting dealt with, then as you
> show, that indicates some level of maintainer engagement. That still has
> failure modes though: someone might have adopted a dist that they’re really
> not up to maintaining, so they avoid the large / scary / critical issues.
>
> Yes, absolute ticket count is not as good as ticket movement or churn,
> even if a release doesn't necessarily result. A clean river is a
> steady-flowing river.
